to advance knowledge of the role of environmentin human health and well-being.

FOCUS

Early-life and pregnancy

Multiple exposures and child health

Development of innovative, integrative tools & methods

Strengthening knowledge base for European Policy

“To exploit novel tools and methods in order to characterise early-life exposure to a wide range of environmental hazards, and integrate and link these with data on major child health outcomes thus developing an “Early-Life Exposome” approach”

WHY HELIX?

Due to our ever changing environment and habits, exposure to environmental contaminants is growing increasingly complex. The totality of environmental (non-genetic) exposures from conception until old age is defined as the ‘exposome’. The HELIX ‘early-life exposome’ approach involves combining all environmental hazards that mothers and children are exposed to, and linking this to the health, growth and development of children.

Pregnancy and the early years of life are well recognized to be periods of high susceptibility to environmental damage with lifetime consequences. This makes early life an important starting point for development of the exposome.

The results of the project will help us to better understand how various types of exposures combine to influence our risk of disease.

OBJECTIVES

To measure a range of chemical and physical environmental hazards in food, consumer products, water, air, noise, and the built environment, in pre and postnatal early-life periods;

LATEST NEWS AND PUBLICATIONS

There is growing interest in examining the simultaneous effects of multiple exposures and, more generally, the effects of mixtures of exposures, as part of the exposome concept. Uncovering such combined effects is challenging owing to the large number of exposures, several of them being highly corre...

With the start of summer in sight, HELIX will soon arrive at the completion of the second official part of the project – data generation and analysis. However, we are not done just yet! To allow us to present to you a most comprehensive set of results and associated implications, the European Commis...

We are pleased to present a short video in which our researchers explain how the HELIX project teaches us more about the environment-physical health relationship. In all, we hope to contribute to improving preventive disease strategies, which leads to lower health costs and a reduction of the enviro...

Reduction in the cost of genomic assays has generated large amounts of biomedical-related data. As a result, current studies perform multiple experiments in the same subjects. While Bioconductor’s methods and classes implemented in different packages manage individual experiments, there is not a sta...

This study focuses on 1 H NMR spectroscopic analyses of urine, which in comparison to blood is a non-invasive biofluid to access, making it a more attractive choice for large-scale biological sampling in children. The influence of the sample collection time-point of the day on the me...

Maternal metabolism during pregnancy is a major determinant of the intra-uterine environment and fetal outcomes. This study characterizes the maternal urinary metabolome throughout pregnancy to identify maternal metabolic signatures of fetal growth in two Spanish subcohorts. It further explains pote...

Events calendar..

What we do

Project management

Stakeholders

In six existing prospective birth cohort studies in Europe, HELIX will estimate prenatal and postnatal exposure to a broad range of chemical and physical exposures: persistent and non-persistent organic chemicals, metals, pesticides, environmental tobacco smoke, water contaminants, air pollutants, noise, UV radiation, and contact with green spaces.
Exposure models will be developed for the full cohorts totalling 32,000 mother-child pairs and biomarkers will be measured in a subset of 1,200.
Nested repeat-sampling panel studies (N=150) will collect data on biomarker variability and use smartphone-linked sensors to assess individual mobility, physical activity and personal exposure to air pollutants and UV radiation.

Finally, a health impact assessment exercise will be conducted for combined early-life exposures.

Martine Vrijheid - martine.vrijheid[at]isglobal.org

Project Coordinator

Diana van Gent - diana.vangent[at]isglobal.org

Project Manager and contact

CREAL - Centre de Recerca en Epidemiologia Ambiental

Parc Recerca Biomèdica de Barcelona

Doctor Aiguader, 88 - 08003, Barcelona

Tel +34 932 14 7354
Fax +34 932 14 7301

The HELIX remit is applicable to a highly diverse stakeholder group including academics, environment & public health departments, SMEs, interest groups, policy developer, media and the wider public. Every effort is made to ensure dynamic communication and consultation channels. WP7 specifically dedicates to stakeholder activities. To find out more about individual stakeholders, see the external links page.

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